Velocette looking fly

I picked up this sweet little Manx style fly screen recently. It had been fitted to a Velo previously. Sadly though when I tried it out it turned out to have been a Velo with a quite different headlight from mine. Undeterred I set about modifying and this is the result. I wanted to tilt the screen back a bit. With a plain round hole for the headlight rim it wants to sit pretty much bolt upright. It looked a bit odd that way so I set to with a jigsaw. It's quite hard to imagine, draw and cut a suitable elipse on a flyscreen that will give the right angle of lean. I'm fairly happy with the outcome, just don't look too closely at the cut - rubber trim can however hide a whole range of sins... 

A shocking incident

Yes, shocking indeed. And a slightly risqué flirty message on the rear.

Fantasy v twin

I bought a few old bike books recently in a bundle and and discovered some cuttings mingled up with everything else. A couple of which were these illustrations of an ohc v twin motor. It's a wonderful looking engine but not familiar at all to me, a bit like the Koehler Escoffier pre-war racing motor but not quite the same. I feel it is a what could have been flight of fancy on the part of the illustrator and what a lovely machine it would have made...

Douglas 4hp combination

Here's a big Duggie. As far as I can tell one of the 4hp (600cc) models that was introduced in 1915 in response to the need for a bigger engine for use as a sidecar tug than the popular 2 3/4hp model. The 4hp model was continued through until 1923. Not too sure of the year of the bike in the photo but more than likely it is a post WW1 model (civilian production was paused for the latter two years of the war). 1919 perhaps? The very furry clothing style of the lady aboard the bike seems to be from the early twenties.

Douglas 4hp 600cc and fluffy rider!

Battlesbridge Motorcycle Museum

It must be a sign of encroaching old farthood that recently I felt a need to return to the place of my studies (Colchester in Essex) to see how the place had changed since I was last there (>20 years, yeesh!) The answer is that I'm really not sure as late forties me has significantly different priorities of where to go and what to see from the early twenties me more concerned with parties and getting high...

The above ramble is leading to breaking the journey home with an impromptu visit to the Battlesbridge Antiques Centre, well worth a visit if you have even a passing interest in old junk. Bimbling around looking at the the myriad of units selling wares that could assist in the ongoing project of further cluttering up an already overcrowded home we stumbled upon the Battlesbridge Motorcycle Museum. Stumbled upon is a bit disingenuous as I already knew of its existence as somewhen in the distant past I had already visited. However the Museum has moved location slightly and was supposed to be closed mid-week. Officially it is only open on Sundays but being an enthusiast run place if any of the volunteers fancy coming along for a while it opens up. A nice informal way to operate but obvs if you are planning a visit on any day but Sunday and have any distance to travel best call in advance to check..

The Museum contains many volunteers' machines and is wonderfully eclectic, there are some bikes of real rarity there too. It is small but they manage to cram in an awful lot of bikes along with a great collection of memorabilia. A visit is time well spent and highly recommended.

This cracking 1930 Panther was parked
outside and offered for sale.

Any Wooler is a special bike but this one
more so than most having been John
Wooler's personal bike.

1928 Norton CS1.

An Evans Power Cycle is a very rare
sight in the UK.

Stacks of bikes!

The Ariel Pixie

 Another British motorcycle industry might have been, the Ariel Pixie.

The Pixie was Val Page's last design and envisaged to be a 75cc ohc machine, a direct competitor to the Honda 90 that had scared the captains of the British motorcycle industry so much. BSA top brass are nowadays derided for watering down Page's design to a 50cc ohv engine and that is held as the reason that the Pixie was a sales failure but the real reason is far wider than that. Honda succeeded because they had new state of the art machinery capable of pushing out C90s manufactured to very fine tolerances in their thousands. Not only this but Honda had a huge market in Asia right on their doorstep. BSA on the other hand were producing bikes on outdated machinery and selling to a limited market of the former Empire and the States. It didn't matter at all what fantastical world-beating design came off the drawing board the sad reality is that when it came off the BSA production line it was always going to be more expensive and less reliable than a Honda Cub. If Honda themselves had licensed BSA to produce the Cub on the BSA production line it would have probably leaked oil and had reliability issues.....

Disregarding the above the Pixie is a cute little machine and for my eyes the styling is right. They are now something of a rarity and the production run was short - 1963 to 1965. This particular brochure is dated 1962, presumably printed in time for the Earls Court Motorcycle Show held in November.

Zorange workshop hand cleaner review

If you look carefully at the ingredients of most heavy duty granulated workshop hand cleaners they use plastic beads as the abrasive medium. That's even some of the ones that market themselves as 'natural'. I used Swarfega for years without fully realising and thinking about what polygrains actually were. Shame on you guys at Swarfega et al for ever thinking that it was a cool thing to be washing tons of tiny plastic grains down the sink.

Of course recently there has been a move away from microbeads, polygrains or whatever the marketing folk care to call the tiny lumps of plastic they sneak in to their products but many still contain them.

Nowadays there are several products on the market that are more friendly to the environment - to the extent that they don't contain actual plastic and really it's a no-brainer to buy these ones and avoid the others like the plague. After searching around I settled on 'Zalpon Zorange' by Rozalex, it is fairly easy to find and the abrasive medium is ground up pumice stone.

The good news is that Zorange is a pretty similar hand washing product to others on the market. It works just as well as Swarfega Tough or any of the others. 

Personally I'd like to find something more enviro-friendly still, in packaging and biodegradable non-toxic nature of the ingredients. Any suggestions welcome. But until then Zorange will suit me fine.